Jacob Zuma, South Africa's president.
The ruling African National Congress's bid to shield South African President Jacob Zuma from opposition attempts to hold him to account for a series of graft scandals has thrown the nation's Parliament into disarray.
The ANC has blocked attempts by the Democratic Alliance and Economic Freedom Fighters to force Zuma to answer questions about accusations by the nation's graft ombudsman that he unduly benefited from a state-funded 215 million-rand ($20 million) upgrade of his private home. As a result the opposition parties have staged walkouts and called into question the impartiality of the parliamentary speaker.
"The ANC in parliament has taken the view that it's got to defend President Zuma at all costs," Allister Sparks, the author of five books on South African politics, said yesterday by phone from Johannesburg. "He's entitled to state his side of the story, but they don't even want him to do that because he will be subjected to questioning. This is outrageous. This is no longer democracy."
Zuma, who won a second five-year term in May, has denied accusations that he authorized the spending on his home at Nkandla in the eastern KwaZulu-Natal province, saying officials responsible for his security took all the decisions.
A former ANC intelligence operative, Zuma, 72, has also been implicated in several other graft scandals, including taking bribes from arms dealers. He denied any wrongdoing, and prosecutors dropped charges against him a few weeks before he became president in 2009.
Bribe Allegations
The Sunday Times said Sept. 28 it obtained fresh evidence from confidential arbitration hearings in a fee dispute between Ajay Sooklal and French arms maker Thales SA that implicates Zuma in accepting corrupt payments. Sooklal, who was contracted by Thales, testified that Zuma agreed to use a code phrase to accept the terms of a 500,000 rand ($44,530) a year bribe, according to the Johannesburg-based newspaper.
The presidency and the ANC rejected the report, saying the allegations were nothing new and any claims of impropriety should be referred to a judicial commission investigating South Africa's weapons purchases.
The 102-year-old ANC has ruled South Africa since the first multiracial elections in 1994 and holds 249 seats in the 400-seat legislature, giving it carte blanche to take decisions. A fist fight between a ruling party member and an opposition lawmaker in 1998 was the only serious violation of parliamentary decorum in the first two decades of post-apartheid rule.
Zuma Heckled
The cordial relations ended after the Economic Freedom Fighters won 25 parliamentary seats in the May elections. Led by former ANC youth leader Julius Malema, the party's lawmakers wear red miners helmets and overalls to parliamentary sittings and routinely heckle Zuma and members of his cabinet, while ignoring calls to order.
EFF members forced the unprecedented cancellation of a parliamentary session on Aug. 21 when they chanted at Zuma to pay back the money spent on his home. The EFF and DA, which has 89 lawmakers, walked out of a committee that's reviewing three investigations into the Nkandla home renovation on Sept. 26, after the ruling party declined to call the president to testify.
"The president is involved in the looting of money of our people," Malema told the panel. "We can only get the truth if he gets prosecuted."
No-Confidence Motion
On Sept. 11, the DA proposed a motion of no-confidence in the parliamentary speaker, Baleka Mbete, who's also the chairwoman of the ANC. The proposal was defeated by the ANC at a Sept. 16 sitting in Cape Town.
"Mbete has been deployed here to make sure President Zuma doesn't have to answer tough questions in Parliament," Mmusi Maimane, the DA's leader in Parliament, told lawmakers. "We sit with a speaker who fights for one man and not for Parliament or for South Africa."
The ANC denies it's blocking attempts to hold Zuma to account and blames the EFF for disrupting Parliament.
"There is rowdiness and disruptions and complete disregard for the rules governing Parliament," Moloto Mothapo, the ANC's spokesman in the legislature, said by phone from Cape Town. "It is clear the intention here is not to conduct oversight through robust and fearless questions, but it is to embarrass and humiliate members of the executive."
The disruptions are the consequence of the party's determination to protect Zuma, said Gary van Staden, a political analyst at NKC Independent Economists.
"The ANC deserves a wake-up call and they are getting one," Van Staden said by phone from Johannesburg. The robust exchanges in Parliament "might even help it to become more relevant. Ours is not the only parliament where people shout at each other and throw chairs at each other," he said.
Source:businessweek
http://www.businessweek.com/news/20...ament-in-disarray-as-anc-bids-to-protect-zuma
